Considers the Arabic novel within the triangle of the nation-state, modernity and tradition.The novel is now a major genre in the Arabic literary field; this book explores the development of the novel, especially the ways in which the genre engages with a

Uncovers the politics of nostalgia and madness inherent in the Arabic novel. The Arabic novel has taken shape in the intercultural networks of exchange between East and West, past and present. Wen-chin Ouyang shows how this has created a politics of nostalgia which can be traced to discourses on aesthetics, ethics and politics relevant to cultural and literary transformations of the Arabic speaking world in the 19th and 20th centuries. She reveals nostalgia and madness as the tropes through which the Arabic novel writes its own story of grappling with and resisting the hegemony of both the state and cultural heritage.

At the heart of this book is a spectral theory of world literature that draws on Edward Said, Aamir Mufti, Jacques Derrida and world-systems theory to assess how the field produces local literature as an "e;other"e; that haunts its universalising, assimilative imperative with the force of the uncanny. It takes the Middle Eastern novel as both metonym and metaphor of a spectral world literature. It explores the worlding of novels from the Middle East in recent years, and, focusing on the pivotal sites of Middle Eastern modernity (Egypt, Turkey, Iran), argues that lost to their global production, circulation and reception is their constitution in the logic of spectrality. With the intention of redressing this imbalance, it critically restores their engagements with the others of Middle Eastern modernity and shows, through a new reading of the Middle Eastern novel, that world literature is always-already haunted by its others, the ghosts of modernity.

"In this book, the author contributes to genre theory, space theory (suggesting allotopia for heterotopia, or describing hypertopia versus hypotopia), the study of authorship, the formation and education novels, and develops such concepts as Leidensgeschichte or the Telemachus complex. Based on Portuguese writer José Régio’s novel A Drop of Blood (1945), he studies the cultural meaning of the immersion paradigm in education and some historical and anthropological features of boarding schools and other institutions of confinement. This book is of interest to those studying the philosophy of education, masculinist nineteenth-century educational theories—in particular about masculine friendships—the place of the Bildungsroman in genre theory, Foucault’s ideas on ‘other spaces’, and the implications of narcissism, melancholia, and nostalgia for the trauma narrative."

This work covers the postcolonial in Arabic fiction. It discusses and questions a large number of novels show cultural diversity in the Arab world. It highlights engagements with postcolonial issues that relate to identity formation, the modern nation-state, individualism, and nationalism.

This text examines the development of the Francophone Algerian novel, its emergence and progress through the pre-independence period, and the extent to which this parallels the political evolution of Algerian nationalism. It also surveys the criticism of French and Algerian intelligentsia.

Covering an impressive range of writings, from the ancient Indian classic The Panchatantra to the works of Shakespeare and the modern writers Jorge Luis Borges, John Barth, and Naguib Mahfouz, Professor Ghazoul places The Arabian Nights in the context of an ongoing storytelling tradition and illustrates its influence on world literature.